In Which I vacillate again with regards to the comment thing

Ok, in a spirit of perpetual oscillation, I'm re-enabling anonymous comments. Because it turns out I deal better with crazies sending me anonymous grumpiness and with spam than with a lack of feedback. But essentially, it would be nice if everyone would sign their comments?

So I was thinking about this the other day; although the future cannot be foretold, it does exist, right? So, although no-one can know for sure how long they will live, there is a certain length of time for which you definitely will live. It doesn't have to be "written" anywhere or anything, but eventually, you will die. At that point you will have been alive for a specific length of time, no more and no less. With me so far?

Ok, right in that specific amount of time (X years, let's say. For the sake of mathematical ease and tragic irony, we'll have you die on your birthday) you will have been happy for a certain amount of time, and sad for a certain amount of time. Obviously there are more than two emotions, but we'll divide them for simplicity into "positive" (P) and "negative" (N), yeah? Now P and N may be equal, or one may be greater than the other, and it would hardly do to enquire, but what if you could choose when to have which one, would you do? Like, if you're having a really bad day, you can use some of the happy from your future, but that means that when you get to that point in your future, you aren't happy for however long it was that you took, because you've already used it up.

If you could choose, would you spread the happiness and sadness equally across your life? Or would you try to get all the sadness over and done with early, knowing that your future would then be unmitigated bliss? If you did that, would the knowledge of the unspoiled happiness in your future (of which you would not know the duration) be enough to get you through the years of accumulated sadness(would you be allowed to have that extra 'P' sneakily, that certain hope, or would the sustaining hope have to be subtracted from your total positivity allotment?)? Or would the concentrated depression drive you mad and spoil your later years?

Alternately, would you use up the happy first up and just kill yourself as soon as you got sad, knowing that that was it for happy times? Could you do that? If P+N=X and your amounts of time were set, would you be able to reduce X, skipping N, without having an effect on P? Maybe this is playing with the rules I've just made up a bit soon, since they're barely established.

Still, it's an interesting idea. Would you just go with the mystery (which is to say, the system we already have) or try to play the game to your own benefit? I think, on balance, I would try to take a bunch of the badness now, ameliorated with happiness in patches, so as to have a rosy future to look forward to.

Maybe the way you answer this sort of question isn't that hypothetical. How else would you describe struggling through a vocational degree and feeling pretty unpeppy most of the time in the hope that one day you'll be a happy doctor? This is a bit less sure, though. After all, who knows if being a doctor will be all that good? Maybe I'll be so busy being a tetchy Med Student that I'll fail to notice the one true love I should've met at an idle job with an advertising firm or something, thus missing all that happiness I thought I was working towards. I guess all investments are a gamble that way.

This is probably what religion is for, huh? "If you try hard enough now, despite all the crap now, later on it'll be all good all the time"?

Hmmm....

Note: on re-reading this, I sound way more unhappy than I am. I am not so much unhappy as not actively happy, which is what I'm used to being a lot of the time.
Right now I'm sewing a thing (which is the best cure for moodiness) with tea and a new CD (new to me, it's the Lucksmiths' debut, so it's also pretty old) and so on, so it's pretty nice.